Understanding Spliterator, Collector and Stream in Java 8

Question

I am having trouble understanding the Stream interface in Java 8, especially where it has to do with the Spliterator and Collector interfaces. My problem is that I simply can't understand Spliterator and the Collector interfaces yet, and as a result, the Stream interface is still somewhat obscure to me.

What exactly is a Spliterator and a Collector, and how can I use them? If I am willing to write my own Spliterator or Collector (and probably my own Stream in that process), what should I do and not do?

I read some examples scattered around the web, but since everything here is still new and subject to changes, examples and tutorials are still very sparse.

Answer 1

You should almost certainly never have to deal with Spliterator as a user; it should only be necessary if you're writing Collection types yourself and also intending to optimize parallelized operations on them.

For what it's worth, a Spliterator is a way of operating over the elements of a collection in a way that it's easy to split off part of the collection, e.g. because you're parallelizing and want one thread to work on one part of the collection, one thread to work on another part, etc.

You should essentially never be saving values of type Stream to a variable, either. Stream is sort of like an Iterator, in that it's a one-time-use object that you'll almost always use in a fluent chain, as in the Javadoc example:

int sum = widgets.stream()
                  .filter(w -> w.getColor() == RED)
                  .mapToInt(w -> w.getWeight())
                  .sum();

Collector is the most generalized, abstract possible version of a "reduce" operation a la map/reduce; in particular, it needs to support parallelization and finalization steps. Examples of Collectors include:

• summing, e.g. Collectors.reducing(0, (x, y) -> x + y)
• StringBuilder appending, e.g. Collector.of(StringBuilder::new, StringBuilder::append, StringBuilder::append, StringBuilder::toString)